I address objections to impossible worlds (IWs) by Timothy Williamson and Kit Fine. Two species of IWs Mark Jago and I had in our Impossible Worlds book were FDE worlds (worlds used in the semantics of the nonclassical logic of First Degree Entailment) and open worlds (worlds not closed under any non-trivial logical consequence relation). Williamson attacks the idea that propositional contents are sets of open worlds; but we explicitly disavowed that very idea. He endorses uses of IWs we developed, except he calls these ‘pseudo-worlds’. In Angellic Content (AC), Fine champions a truthmaker semantics and in Constructing the Impossible advocates its superiority over IWs. But his semantics also includes states that are IWs, as characterized in the literature: representations of absolute impossibilities. They are like Barwise and Perry’s situations — which is how FDE worlds have been interpreted for decades. A key difference between AC and FDE is that only the latter validates ‘absorption principles’ one may find unwelcome in a characterization of propositional content. But a more topic-sensitive FDE can make them fail. Williamson has also objected to the idea of giving truth(making) and falsity(making) conditions separately, as in both AC and FDE. But FDE can work with truth conditions only and the compatibility semantics for negation. AC can work the same way.

In recent years, several kinds of non-referential uses of names have received attention within semantics. However, the lack of a principled basis for drawing the distinction between uses that a semantic theory of names must account for (‘literal’ uses) and other uses that it need not explain by itself (‘non-literal uses’) represents an important deficiency in the debate. A prominent objection (the ‘Sceptic’s Challenge’) against semantic views that treat predicative uses as literal exemplifies the kind of problem that can result from this deficiency. This article proposes a general manner of drawing the line between literal and non-literal uses of names. Further, by providing a rationale for treating predicative uses as literal, it also provides a response to the Sceptic’s Challenge.

I maintain that polysemy is a contextual phenomenon, but that the nature of the context-dependence of polysemy has been misunderstood, a fact which is brought out by the especially difficult case of copredication. In this paper, I offer a truth-conditional semantics that can accommodate copredicative sentences, in which polysemous terms are being used in more than one sense, and thus have more than one extension simultaneously. I argue, further, that my account is compatible with externalism, which is significant because the existence of polysemy is often thought to pose a problem for externalism. Context is required to play an important role in this semantics, which, as I will show, is substantially different from accounts currently on the market.

Según Maite Ezcurdia, los demostrativos son expresiones directamente referenciales con significados lingüísticos complejos. Esta dualidad en niveles de significado, que ella justifica con un análisis de cómo diferentes tipos y usos de demostrativos interactúan anafóricamente, la lleva a concluir que los demostrativos simples son no composicionalmente complejos, mientras que los demostrativos complejos lo son, en parte, por su composición. En este artículo extiendo su metodología y discuto su conclusión. Arguyo que la distinción entre demostrativos se explica por cómo funcionan diferentes tipos de contexto para seleccionar el referente, y no por composición semántica. Como Maite nos enseñó, la complejidad no siempre es composicional.

As Chalmers himself notes, his two-dimensional semantics leads to the problem of how scenarios, i.e. epistemically possible worlds, can best represent the information who I am, where I am, and what time it is now. For Chalmers, the natural solution to this problem of indexicality is to identify scenarios with centered worlds: ordered tuples of (possible) worlds, individuals, times, and places. According to such a solution, two arbitrary tokens of ‘now’ and ‘here’ (respectively) have the same primary (or epistemic) intension, picking out the time/place marked at the center of any given scenario. Against this, I will object that there are a posteriori true, i.e. epistemically contingent, utterances of both ‘Now = now’ and ‘Here = here’. Since identifying scenarios with centered worlds seems to be the natural solution to the problem of indexicality, this will undermine Chalmers’ two-dimensional semantics.

Este texto presenta un análisis funcionalista de las expresiones veritativas, i.e., del vocabulario de la verdad. En la sección 1 se interpreta el funcionalismo de Ezcurdia como una posición pragmatista. En la sección 2 se analiza la función de las atribuciones de verdad y la contribución específica de las expresiones veritativas a ella. Estas últimas permiten que las atribuciones de verdad sean instrumentos para la aseveración de proposiciones y la expresión de algunos rasgos del acto de habla en curso. En la sección 3 se argumenta que, debido a su naturaleza, las atribuciones de verdad pueden expresar diferentes contenidos en diferentes contextos manteniendo una función constante a través de ellos.

In this article, I evaluate which version of panpsychism is best suited to address the challenges faced by a theory of consciousness. I first argue that a panpsychist theory is more likely to be successful if it meets two conditions: (1) it must be compatible with the Integrated Information Theory (IIT), and (2) it must provide at least a preliminary indication of how to solve the combination problem. I consider three main versions of panpsychism: constitutive panpsychism micropanpsychism and cosmopanpsychism), emergent panpsychism (strong and weak), and panprotopsychism (panqualitivist and panexperientialist). I conclude that weak emergent panpsychism, together with the two variants of panprotopsychism (panqualitivism and panexperientialism), or a combination of these approaches, shows genuine potential for panpsychism to remain a coherent and viable position.

Resumen

Este artículo tiene como objetivo explicar los usos no referenciales de las expresiones referenciales a través del concepto de inhibición. Tomando como punto de partida el referencialismo funcional, analizo cómo distintos inhibidores afectan a diferentes tipos de indéxicos puros. A partir de este análisis, identifico dos formas de inhibición de la lectura referencial: la inhibición temporal, causada por adverbios temporales de frecuencia, y la inhibición cuantificacional, producida por cuantificadores universales y existenciales. Concluyo que la inhibición ofrece una explicación sistemática de los usos no referenciales de los indéxicos puros, y permite comprender mejor cómo ciertas construcciones lingüísticas modifican su interpretación.

Navigating the impasse between rule-based literalism and radical contextualism, this article addresses a central challenge for both: explaining how speakers effortlessly understand deviant or novel utterances. It proposes a scenario-building model that treats understanding as a dynamic, collaborative process in which linguistic conventions function as scaffolding for the joint construction of plausible interpretive scenarios. By integrating insights from the epistemology of understanding, the model seeks to demonstrate that communicative success is a matter of degree, determined by the overlap between the scenarios constructed by speakers and hearers and by successful intention recognition. This provides a structured framework for modeling partial understanding and communicative alignment.